Some mobile devices, such as cell phones and smart phones, are associated with shared subscriptions in which a single pool of data is available to be shared among several such devices.
Progress in mobile network technology allows greater volumes of data to be consumed by any one mobile device, and the gaps between the usage behaviour of different devices have been able to increase as a result. For example, one of a set of devices sharing a single data pool may consume data at a rate many times higher than another of the set of devices. Both devices are allocated certain quotas during use, but the “high volume” device may find itself interrupted repeatedly as it exhausts its quota but cannot secure another quota because the remainder of the pool is still reserved by the “low volume” device.
Current attempts to balance the quotas for the set of devices can lead to interruptions as mentioned above, to undesirably high signalling traffic, or both.